This application to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality requests support for the Rocky Mountain Evidence-Based Health Care Workshop to be conducted each August for 2004, 2005, and 2006. It responds to PA-03-117 AHRQ Grant Program for Large Conference Support. The workshop goals are also consistent with those of the AHRQ Translating Research into Practice (TRIP) initiative (PA-02-066). The workshop, initiated in 1999, has been successfully conducted each August with AHRQ small conference grant support. With this application the dissemination and training goals of the workshop have been expanded. The workshop is designed to train participants in the principles and application of evidence-based medicine to improve clinical practice, enhance patient safety, sustain practitioner behavior, disseminate health care research information to wide audiences, and inform public policy formulation. The specific aims of this application are to: 1) sustain the innovative 5-day workshop for individual health care professionals and professionals from recruited health care systems; 2) deliver a workshop tailored to health care journalists and consumer advocates; 3) assess the impact of the workshop on skill levels and articulate barriers to sustaining EBHC practice across professional settings; and 4) design post-workshop support mechanisms to promote the sustained use/dissemination of evidence in health care decision making, communications, and policy making. The workshop is a unique "laboratory" for teaching evidence-based health care. By combining a variety of teaching methods to address shortcomings of traditional CME, an intensive, experiential learning opportunity worth 35 hours of CME credit is presented. The workshop format includes plenary and small group-problem-based sessions, and individual study. Curriculum materials offer maximum flexibility for participants to set the content of their learning agendas. It is expected that participants will be able to ask relevant questions, acquire evidence, critically appraise the evidence, and apply these to the situations presented to make well informed health decisions and communications. The Colorado Health Outcomes (COHO) Program sponsors the workshop. The course directors are Andrew Oxman, Director of the Department of Health Services Research at the Norwegian Directorate for Health and Social Affairs and Judith Baxter, COHO education core director. Faculty with extensive experience and training in EBHC are the primary tutors for the five-day workshop. These internationally recognized experts are responsible for presentations in the plenary sessions and facilitating the small groups, and are teamed with a local co-tutor and a medical librarian, resulting in a participant-to-tutor ratio of 3 to 1. This workshop supports the dissemination and implementation of health services research results by training diverse groups who are responsible for effectively using research results in clinical decision making, communicating these results to wide audiences, and developing health policy. [unreadable] [unreadable]